The Department of Social Medicine at the Medical School has been awarded a grant from the Freeman Foundation to develop an exchange and fellowship program for faculty from East and Southeast Asian countries. The program, under the auspices of the Department's Center for the Study of Culture and Medicine, is an attempt to improve mutual understanding between Americans and members of East and Southeast Asian countries by changing cultural misperceptions, improving cross-cultural communication, developing better short-term and longer-term professional relationships, and creating substantive collaborations in research and academic work related to health and health care.

The new Freeman Foundation Fellowships will be offered to scholars in midcareer who have shown excellence in research and teaching in fields related to health and social behavior in Asian societies. Each year, four fellowships will be awarded to scholars in the health and social sciences from academic institutions in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Freeman Fellows join the Department of Social Medicine for a fellowship year to participate in courses in medical anthropology and social medicine, and to develop both a research proposal and a teaching proposal to take back to their home institutions. These proposals will seek to build interdisciplinary ties between the health and social sciences, to promote better understanding of global problems, and to explore new approaches to those problems through research and teaching. Medical anthropology provides a particularly salient focus for cross-cultural exchanges and fellowships because the very subject of the field itself centers on the relationship between

cultural differences and shared human experiences in improving health and well-being.

Faculty members of the Center for the Study of Culture and Medicine, directed by Arthur Kleinman, have had considerable experience in working with visiting fellows to develop research projects on social health problems as well as build local programs in other countries that relate anthropology to medicine, much as Harvard's Program in Medical Anthropology does through the Departments of Anthropology and Social Medicine here.

In addition to scholars from Asia traveling to the Medical School, each year several Harvard faculty will travel to key institutions in East and Southeast Asia for short periods for intensive teaching workshops aimed at assisting local institutions in developing medical anthropology programs.

The grant also makes available an annual summer research fellowship for a Harvard undergraduate and another for a Harvard medical student so that they can pursue field research in an East or Southeast Asian country.

The 1997-98 Freeman Fellows are as follows:

Dr. Subandi, of Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, is a psychologist interested in the area of spirituality, mental health, and alternative psychtherapy. He will be examining these areas in the context of Javanese Islamic culture and comparing them with practices in the United States.

Yan Fei, of Shanghai Medical University's School of Public Health in Shanghai, China, specializes in community medicine. She will be researching a comparison of the end of life experience for elderly people who die of chronic desease in the United States, China, and Japan.

Tana Nilchaikovit, of the faculty of medicine at Ramathibodi Hospital and Mahidol Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand, is a psychiatrist who will be researching life experiences and ways of coping of patients with breast cancer in Thailand.

Xu Yifeng, of the Shanghai Mental Health Center, Shanghai, China, is a psychiatrist studying the impact of the sociocultural factors in the course of schizophrenia.